ideas for a semi-retro gaming machine

[STERKOFF]

I am thinking I would enjoy building a circa early 90's to around 2000 or so dedicated gaming PC using parts from that era. Would not be going online with it, just use it to play games from my childhood like old Sierra point and click adventures and other titles up to around the year 2000. So I was first curious which Windows OS I should use. I would like to have USB support so thinking at least 98, but I do have a copy of XP still... I just want to be able to have good backward compatibility.

Then comes the real tricky question, which CPU and video card to get... Maybe I try to put together what would have been state of the art in the year 2000?? Has anyone goofed around and done something like this? Any thoughts?

 

[JWade]

I made a retro machine using windowsME, I also have an XP and a Vista machine also.

The ME machine is an athlon 1.1ghz 1.5gb ram (AGP)
XP is a P4 2.5ghz (AGP)
vista machine is skt 775 single core 660, 3.6ghz, 3gb ram (32 bit vista is the only one i could find to load on it)(PCI-E)

my suggestion is look at what you can get drivers for. some drivers for older stuff can be hard to find

 

[TheELF]

my suggestion is look at what you can get drivers for. some drivers for older stuff can be hard to find

Very much this.
Vogon's is a great source for win98 drivers and will give you an idea on what hardware to hunt for.

VOGONS Vintage Driver Library

vogonsdrivers.com

My suggestion would be to get at least a core2 system an stick with windows XP this is going to be pretty straightforward and shouldn't be much of a challenge.

For windows 98 you would need a pentium 4 system and finding drivers for everything will be a bitch.

just use it to play games from my childhood like old Sierra point and click adventures and other titles up to around the year 2000.

Just saying but especially point and click games run perfectly on windows 10 with either scummVM,dosbox or for some of them even natively.
The same goes for most of the games of that time,most of them have either new installers or patches that the fans have done that make the games perfectly playable.